Uli K

Uli K

Trying to elucidate the Bala Club vision is like trying to catch smoke. The emerging London party collective are fuelled by a shared objective of representing otherness and creating commanding party atmospheres with dynamic, punching soundtracks.

Uli K brings a more gentle energy to the Bala Club cosmos than his brother, the fiercely caustic DJ-producer Kamixlo. The singer-producer flits between Spanish and English when singing with a beat palette made up of placid synths and glassy, weightless percussion. Stylistically, Uli still draws from the worlds of reggaeton, trap, kizomba and hyphy like the rest of Bala Club, but the sound is dreamier. The highs are lighter and the lows more vacant.

For this entry into the Crack Mix series, Uli turns in a miniature odyssey. An angelic club-lite cocktail which swells into a distorted, crushed climax before jolting into a string of crunchy R&B edits and histrionic outings from artists like serpentwithfeet. Themes of heaven, demons, divine beings and wrestling are the lifeblood of the Bala Club universe – united by otherness and driven by escapism.

Bala Club are hellbent on eluding classification or definition. Here, Uli K provides a fittingly inscrutable introduction to that code.